1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates to solar photovoltaic cells and, more specifically, to method for manufacturing low cost base material for such cells and method for manufacturing low cost cells and the resulting cell device structure.
2. Related Art
Conventional energy generation from fossil fuels represents the greatest threat since the last ice age to the planet's well being. Among all of the alternative energy sources, next to conservation, solar photovoltaic cells are arguably the cleanest, ubiquitous and potentially most reliable alternative compared to other approaches such as ethanol, hydropower and wind power. The concept is a simple solid-state p-n junction that converts light into a small dc voltage. The cells may be stacked to charge an automobile battery or feed a power grid via a DC/AC inverter. Of various semiconductor materials available for this purpose, silicon commands 99% of the photovoltaic solar cell production. Compared to other compound semiconductor based solar cells, which do have higher conversion efficiencies, especially in small area cells, silicon is much more abundant in the earth's crust and provides proven reliability of up to 30 years on a weather-beaten roof in various climates around the world. Moreover, large-scale commercial fabrication techniques using silicon have been employed for tens of years and are well developed and understood. Consequently, silicon is likely to remain the dominant base material for solar cells.
However, despite over thirty years of work, silicon-based solar cells have not performed up to their potential for large-scale power generation. A major barrier to such acceptance is the cost associated with fabricating solar cells, and especially the cost of raw, base material (substrates) used to fabricate the solar cells. The material accounts for over half the total cost of solar cell fabrication, as compared to only about 10% in case of semiconductor microchips. Ironically, because of enormous demand and high production costs, the price of the silicon material for solar cells actually increases in tandem with the price of oil. For example, over the past few years the cost per kg of polysilicon material used to produce solar silicon wafers has increased dramatically, and for thin-film solar cells the cost of Silane gas used to deposit the film as well as that of NF3 gas to clean up the reactors following deposition have similarly increased. In contrast, semiconductor chip prices (i.e., per unit of memory or logic function) have decreased exponentially over the past thirty years, following Moore's law. This difference in learning curves can be related to major differences in the technology and relative cost contributions of materials versus process and design for ever increasing device density per unit area.
According to the current state of the art, polysilicon-based solar cell production is done in three major stages. First, large quantities of silicon wafers are produced for the substrate—typically a million wafers per month for a rather modest 25 MW capacity factory. Second, these wafers are processed into solar cells by forming a p-n junction and metallization. Third, these wafers are then “packaged” into a module for installation into the users' facilities.
The base silicon wafers for the solar cells are made by thermally decomposing hazardous gases containing Si—H—Cl, such a di-chlorosilane and tri-chlorosilane, to produce ultra-high purity polysilicon, generally referred to as nine nines, i.e., 99.9999999% pure. These gases are both highly flammable and toxic. However, due to the environmental and health hazards in the gasification of silicon, few factories operate in the world, thereby causing a bottleneck for the semiconductor and solar cell industry. Newly proposed silicon gasification factories face resistance from local communities based on environmental and safety concerns. These factories also require large capital investments and long lead times. Consequently, there is always an imbalance between demand and supply of bare silicon wafers.
The pure silicon (called polysilicon, following gasification and decomposition of the silane-based compounds) is generally provided in the form of pellets fit for semiconductor and solar cell applications. The pellets are then melted and, using a seed, a single crystal boule or multi-crystalline ribbons are pulled. Alternatively, the polysilicon is cast into cylindrical shape. The pulled cylinder is—saw cut, shaped and polished into 5-6 inch round wafers, which thereafter may be cut into square wafers. Wet chemical etch in an alkaline chemical such as KOH is then applied for texture. The p-n junctions are formed with POCl3 furnace diffusion. Anti-reflective coating passivation is then applied with PECVD SiON. Screen printing silver paste is applied to n-type surface and aluminum paste is applied to the p-type surface. The paste is then sintered to form electrical contacts. Finally, the cells are tested and sorted according to their characteristics, e.g., their I-V curve.
The above processes are well known and have been practiced in the industries for many years. However, while in semiconductor the majority of the cost (i.e., the value) is in the processes that transform the polished silicon wafer into a functioning integrated circuit, in solar cell fabrication the processes that transform the polished wafer into a functioning solar cell are less costly than the processes to produce the polished wafers themselves. That is, in commercial terms, the process of transforming a silicon wafer into solar cells is not a high-value added step in the overall chain of solar panel fabrication. Therefore, any improvement or reduction in costs for manufacturing the starting wafers—as opposed to improvement in cell-fabrication technology—would enable drastic reduction in the price of the finished solar panels.
To overcome the problem of Silicon raw material for solar cells, there have been aggressive efforts along two main approaches to reduce the amount of Silicon consumed per watt of the solar cell. These are:                1. Reduction of the wafer thickness from the standard 500 μm to ˜300 μm. This approach is limited by the strength of the wafers, which tend to break during high-speed transport through process equipment.        2. Use of thin films of various solar cell materials such as Silicon, CdTe, CuInGaSe typically on glass and other cheaper substrates. To allow the light irradiation on the solar cell, one of the electrodes is made up of a conducting transparent oxide (CTO), such as InSnOx or ZnO2.        
Among various thin-film solar cell materials, again Silicon is the most cost effective materials. In the solar structure, the thickness is reduced to about 1-10 μm from 300-500 μm for wafers. Of this 1-10 μm, most of the deposited film thickness typically consists of an undoped intrinsic amorphous layer of Si—H polymer, abbreviated as i a-Si:H layer. This i aSi:H layer, which is sandwiched between the doped n-type a-Si:H and p-type a-Si:H films, provides the volume needed for the absorption of the incident sunlight, whereby electron-hole pairs are created. These carriers then diffuse to the n- and p-electrodes of the solar cell to create a photovoltaic voltage and current for power generation. However, because the infra-red wavelengths of the solar spectrum have long transmission depths through silicon, a significant amount of solar radiation is lost, thereby reducing the efficiency of the photovoltaic conversion. That is, quantum efficiency of conversion is lost, particularly for the longer wavelengths in the infra-red range. Another intrinsic limitation of thin film structures is that the minority carrier diffusion lengths are limited by the thickness of the film to much less than 10 um. This is a figure of merit for predicting the solar cell efficiency of the finished product. For pure crystalline silicon based solar cells, the diffusion lengths are typically about 80 um.
There are other fundamental limitations to thin-film solar cell structures, which have so far limited the thin-film solar cell production to about 5% of the total solar panel market, compared to over 80% for the silicon wafer-based solar cells. Some of these limitations are as follows:                1. Cost of Silane gas for depositing the a-Si:H films has been rapidly rising for the same reason as the price of polysilicon, namely capacity shortages of this extremely flammable gas. Besides Silane, the plasma enhanced CVD reactors used to produce thin solar films need large amounts of a specialty NF3 gas to perform in-situ plasma cleaning of the PECVD reactor to ensure a high uptime of the production equipment.        2. The photovoltaic conversion efficiency of thin film silicon solar cells is low, sometimes less than half that of silicon wafer-based solar cells.        3. The capital equipment needed to set up a thin-film solar cell factory, generally at about $50M, is nearly 10 times that for a silicon wafer-based solar cell factory of comparable energy output. The capital cost is mainly driven by vacuum based plasma CVD reactors used to deposit the a-Si:H and SiN passivation films, and vacuum based PVD reactors used to deposit the CTO films.        
As can be understood from the above, the solar cell industry has been bifurcated into two camps: the silicon wafer-based solar cell camp that seeks to utilize highly pure silicon wafers to obtain high cell efficiency, and thin-film camp that shy away from using silicon wafer substrates in order to reduce costs. Consequently, the silicon wafer-based camp is constrained by the availability of pure silicon wafers, while the thin-film camp is constrained by conversion efficiency, mainly due to insufficient absorption of light in the glass substrate, as well as by the cost of SiH4 gas needed to produce relatively thick absorbing layer of intrinsic hydrogenated silicon.